Daily Times
June 6, 2008
Southern comfort for BJP
by J Sri Raman
The Jan Sangh may have started off as the party of refugees, but the Sangh and the BJP grew subsequently in the Hindi-Hindu-Hindustani region as a political party active on several fronts. In the South, however, the BJP made its debut as a socially divisive force
On May 25, Narendra Modi sounded even more triumphant than he did six months before. On December 23 last, he had won Gujarat a third time for his Bharatiya Janata Party. This time, the party had conquered the southern state of Karnataka, winning yet another in a series of state assembly elections.
Proclaimed Modi: “Karnataka will not only be a gateway for us to the South, but a highway to New Delhi.” The assumptions behind that statement may be obvious, but deserve to be discussed nevertheless.
The first and foremost assumption is that the ballot won in a southern state was a breakthrough, both geographical and historical, for the BJP. According to conventional political wisdom, the region to the south of the Vindhya mountain range was not only free from the Far Right party but was somehow resistant to the BJP’s well-known blandishments. The magnified myth was that the sacred territory — comprising the mainstream states of Tamilnadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Kerala — was out of bounds for the BJP and the parivar (the Far Right “family”).
The second assumption is that, since the region is the missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle, the Karnataka conquest is a major step towards the consolidation of the BJP as a national party and as a contender for all-India power.
Both assumptions are egregiously erroneous.
It was never true that the South could possibly have no space for the BJP with its “Hindi-Hindu-Hindustani” image. The region, of course, was not an immediate victim of Partition and all the inhumanity that accompanied it. Forces of communal politics could find and have found ways of striking roots in the four states, even if the BJP or its parent Jan Sangh could not develop a large enough legislative presence here for long years.
The real hurdle for the BJP and the parivar in the region lay in its pioneering social reform movements — of, by and for the intermediate and lower castes. This was because it was the upper castes that identified with the Far Right more than others and they did so all the more under threat to their dominance from the other castes.
The empowerment of the intermediate castes, ironically, however, eased this problem for the party and the parivar. The empowerment spelt also an end to the social reform movements in their true spirits. The newly victorious regional forces, with no ideology to carry them beyond the caste aspirations, found it no problem at all to make peace with the Far Right and even to enter into political pacts with them. The “Dravidian” parties of Tamilnadu, for example, deriving their power from remembered wrongs, suffered at the hands of forces the Far Right represents, were all power-sharing partners of BJP-led governments of the past in New Delhi.
The political collaboration was facilitated by its social correlative, with the reform movements not having left even meaningful relics. The Jan Sangh may have started off as the party of refugees, but the Sangh and the BJP grew subsequently in the Hindi-Hindu-Hindustani region as a political party active on several fronts. In the South, however, the BJP made its debut as a socially divisive force and has striven to build a constituency of communalism more than anything else.
This is particularly true of Karnataka. Starting with agitations aimed at hoisting the “national tricolour flags” atop dargahs, the party went on, while sharing power as a partner pre-election state government, to launch a tirade and a textbook offensive against the heritage of Tipu Sultan, of whom Karnataka and the country were proud as freedom fighter until the other day.
The BJP’s apologists now claim that the party refrained from raising “Hindutva” issues in the run-up to the elections. The party’s record made it unnecessary for it to do so in order to retain its communal constituency, even as it tried to win over uncommitted sections of voters. What was more notable was the way it added a Shiva Sena-type chauvinism to its communal plank, targeting the Tamil minority in the state over a water-sharing issue with neighbouring Tamilnadu, even while the party’s All-India leadership was voicing nationalist outrage at the Sena’s war on north Indians in Maharashtra.
The Karnataka victory has made BJP’s shadow Prime Minister Lal Krishna wax eloquent about the party’s prospects of winning a parliamentary majority in general elections due next year. We must wait to see whether a sum of regionalist victories as in Gujarat and Karnataka will spell undivided power in the Centre.
What is clear, meanwhile, is the role being played by Congress, in the BJP’s political return after its electoral rout in 2004. In Gujarat and other states, Congress has helped the BJP considerably by refusing to fight the politics of communalism frontally. Fascism, of course, is an attempt among other things, to deflect attention from the people’s real issues. From this, however, it does not follow that Congress and its avowedly secular allies should take up people’s issues only during the polls — and only in order to avoid the issues of communal fascism.
That will be no way to beat the BJP back, whether in the South or the North or any other region of India.
The writer is a journalist based in Chennai, India. A peace activist, he is also the author of a sheaf of poems titled ‘At Gunpoint’
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